The Spirit Of Your Mind Is Not Your Mood

Bright kitchen, back door open, music on because her niece put it on and nobody has turned it off, and two people are dancing badly on purpose while a third does something to an onion.

She is forty-five.

Two years of pain that is managed, which is a word that means real and controlled and not gone, and a combination of things she takes that make the managing possible and that also do something else.

They flatten her.

Not sadness. She wants that distinguished, because everybody assumes sadness. It is that the range has come in. The top is not as high and the bottom is not as low, and what used to be a hill country of feeling is now a plateau with weather on it.

She notices it most in worship. She used to be a person who wept in the third song. She is not that person now. She sings the words and she believes every one of them and something that used to happen does not happen.

And what she has concluded, over about eighteen months, and has never told her husband or her pastor or the woman she prays with, is that God has gone quiet in her. That the flatness is a spiritual reading. That something has stopped.

If your feelings have been flattened, you know that conclusion, and you know that you can produce no evidence against it, because the evidence you would use is exactly the thing that is gone.

He wrote the spirit of your mind, and that is not your mood

The weight first and whole, because on this site the honest paragraph comes before the good one and it never gets shortened.

What this costs is not the pain, which is managed and which is real. It is the instrument. It costs you the way you have always known God was near, which was through a feeling, and losing an instrument is different from losing a thing. It costs the third song, which used to do what it did. It costs you a private conclusion built over eighteen months that you cannot argue with, because arguing with it would require the very faculty that has been flattened. And it costs you the honest sentence to your husband, who would take it hard and who has already taken enough.

I am not calling that small and I am not putting it beside anybody else's, because on this site there is no ranking of what people carry and there never will be. Any word from God that needs your two years made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before anything else: if the flatness has moved somewhere darker, tell one living person today, and tell your doctor, because a change like that is theirs to know about. Nothing on this page is medical advice, and nothing here would ever suggest that what you take is a lack of faith, and nothing here suggests stopping anything. A crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks nobody to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who put music on and leave it on.

Now, Ephesians 4, and read the noun Paul attaches the renewing to.

And be renewed in the spirit of your mind.Ephesians 4:23

The spirit of your mind.

That is an odd phrase and it is odd on purpose. He could have written be renewed in your heart, which everybody would have read as feeling. He could have written be renewed in your mind, which everybody would have read as thinking. He writes the spirit of your mind, which is neither, and which points at the disposition underneath both: the set of a person, the direction they are facing, what they are toward.

That is a deeper layer than mood, and it is not the same instrument, and it does not have a reading you can take.

You are being renewed in a layer that sits under the one that got flattened. Ephesians 4:23 names the spirit of the mind rather than the feelings, and the Holy Spirit is the one named all through that letter as the seal and the agent.

Now the voice of it, again, because Paul is consistent about this: be renewed. Passive. Not something you generate and not something you monitor.

And that matters enormously for a woman who has lost the ability to monitor. If the renewing were something you were supposed to feel happening, then a flattened person would be locked out of it. Paul does not put it there.

You have never been asked to detect it, and the detecting equipment was never the point. That is written into Ephesians 4:23, and His Spirit in you is the one carrying out a renewing in a layer no medication reaches.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because eighteen months of good things have already been said in that kitchen.

It does not promise you the third song back. It makes no claim about your feelings or your medication or your two years, and I will not make one, because what God does there is His, in His own way, and I am not going to speak about a body I have never met.

And it does not tell you the flatness is good for you or that it is a fair price for the managing. This site does not do that. It is not a trade. The renewing in that verse is additional and it is not compensation, and anybody who has offered it to you as an exchange was wrong.

You were never told that a feeling is the reading God works from. Scripture names a layer under the mood, and the same Spirit who inspired it is the one who works there while a kitchen is loud.